Actually, the modulo behavior comes out of how the CPU designers made the CPUs work decades ago. It was very easy for them to just drop all those extra bits (or not even compute them). And, of course, now that behavior is cast in stone...I wouldn't call it a bug. It looks like modulo arithmetic to me.Let's not make a virtue of necessity. The type "int" was likely designed with the intent to provide a type that could be used for actual integers in a variety of circumstances, while giving good performance. The modulo semantics is rarely useful (especially the 30-bit signed variety) but is the price paid for reasonable performance with a simple implementation.